by Dana Spiotta
“Okay, I know.”
“And it wasn’t intended to be violent. It was just destructive. Of stuff. For a purpose. Like the Berrigan brothers said, some property doesn’t have a right to exist.”
Berry began to cry over her pancakes and syrup, clutching her fork.
“Intentions do matter. They make all the difference…”
Caroline felt the words fail her, and her face felt hot, and then she realized she was crying too.
“Why are you crying?” Caroline said, wiping at her eyes.
“It was a brave thing, honestly, I think it was a brave thing,” Berry said.
“It doesn’t matter what you think. I didn’t do it for you.” Caroline still felt angry at her, which made no sense. Then she inhaled and made herself look placidly at Berry. “I’m so sorry you have to know. I shouldn’t have told you.”
“I can’t really believe it, to be honest with you. It hasn’t sunk in, you know, that you’re this entirely other person than what I thought.” Berry reached her hand across the table and touched Caroline’s arm. “But I think I understand, though. Really. Look at the bright side, at least the president is getting his now. He’s stepped on his own cock, hasn’t he? The war’s ending, and now he’s going down too.”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t feel the way you thought it would, does it?” Caroline said. She pulled her hand out from under Berry’s. “It just feels like everything has gone to shit.”
They hitchhiked back to Hepatitis Hill. They didn’t, in fact, speak of it again, nor incidentally did they speak of where “they” would be going next.
Caroline knew that she would have to leave soon. She knew that the FBI would get to the communes, and they already knew her alias probably. She would have to leave in the night, and go somewhere far away and change her name again. And when the FBI came, maybe Berry would talk or maybe she wouldn’t. But Caroline would be long gone by then.
Caroline hid in the woods and headed for the highway as soon as she saw them. She kept some emergency money for just this instance. Because from the minute she spoke to Berry she knew it would happen, and sooner rather than later. She saw the men in their suits, the sedan. She did not know if Berry would tell them anything. Berry would either betray her or suffer. And Caroline would not stick around to find out. She walked with speed past trees and rocks and old broken fences. She bushwhacked until she found a road, and then she looked for a ride.
The day had begun the same as many other days. She woke up in the common house at dawn. She went outside to start laundry duty, which she liked. The morning was cold and clean—the air smelled sweet with burning wood. Already people were up and cooking. She grabbed a pile of towels to fold and sat on a stone in the early morning sun. She watched the camp come to life from a distance. She could see, through the tree branches and the red and yellow leaves, the women from the tech-nos coming down the hill in their wimples and robes like medieval nuns. They were theatrical in their reinvention. Reinvention as choice, as pride.
Watching them, Caroline realized her time was over. Before the feds showed up, before the sedan, she felt it in her bones. Living in the woods made you believe in intuition. She could never be a carefree reinventor. She lived more like a woman in a doomed affair. As days, then weeks and months eventually went by, the accumulation of time made things not deeper, or better, or safer, but more dangerous, more doomed. Eventually the day would come when consecutive events could not help but be traced, ruminated upon, dwelt upon, all leading to her, or to him. One weak link, from one weak moment. An overlooked detail, or a mistakenly trusted person—Mel, say, or Berry. All things led to her because all things led to her. The truth wanted to be told; this was the force of facts versus will and luck. Facts always win because they are simply always, and they will outlast everything.
She left because she didn’t belong there. These women dreamt of utopia, but what else did they have to do? Caroline had lots of things to do: Run. Hide.
Dusk approached by the time she made it to the road that would eventually get her a hitch to the highways. She felt calm in her escape and didn’t mind waiting for a ride, walking roadside. Another cloudless, cold fall day, the sun setting and throwing long shadows across groomed meadows, specific and detailed near tree trunks and telephone poles, and then stretched out to such abstraction that it took a minute to determine which shadow belonged to which object; the world divided into the bright—sun-facing, gloriously illuminated in gold-brown light—and the shadowed—darkened and indefinite, as murky as the future, and as mysterious. She didn’t get a ride for hours, and she walked through expanses of fields ending in two-block hamlets, the clusters of houses creating swathes of cold darkness across the roadside.
She hadn’t seen them talk to Berry. She didn’t see Berry point at her work station, tears in her eyes. In truth she didn’t even see men in suits, or the dark, late-model sedan. She just felt it and didn’t look back. She disappeared.
She hitchhiked west, and fourteen months after her invention, she would leave Caroline out on the road somewhere and think of another person to be. She was supposed to meet up with Bobby on New Year’s Eve, in L.A. By then she would be someone new. If you don’t hear from me, we’ll meet at the end of next year at the Blue Cantina in Venice Beach. That gave her six weeks or so.
She stopped first in a small farming town in Pennsylvania. She lasted only a week at a rooming house. She stayed in bed for three days straight. The sheets were clean and pressed, but they scratched her skin and had an undersmell of detergent and mold. They seemed to hold dampness deep within them, and she couldn’t rest. She couldn’t find a job. She quickly approached broke. She even ate dinner at the church soup kitchen.
She forced herself back on the road, again hitching. Anywhere west. She thought she could work somewhere for a couple of weeks and get enough money for a bus to L.A.
She stuck to the highway and walked in the direction she was headed as she hitched. She had a system. She refused any rides with two men, or with men in pickups, or with men with pinwheel, Benzedrine eyes. It was getting dark, and she decided to accept a ride from a man in a beige Pontiac Le Mans. This seemed a good bet—he had a woman with him. Caroline sat in the back, and the three of them traveled in silence for many miles. She noted, discreetly, that the woman was far too young, really, to be his wife. But she also noted the man’s clean, conservatively cut clothes. His pressed, collared shirt. His short, combed-back hair. She trusted getting a ride from a semi-establishment type. A regular middle-class guy who obeyed the law. The young girl, however, was not dressed neatly. She wore cutoff, tight, faded jeans. She sat with her feet up on the dashboard. The soles of her bare feet were black with dirt. She looked younger than Caroline. The girl wiggled in her seat and didn’t speak. After a while, she took out rolling papers and began to deftly roll a joint. She wound it in her fingers and neatly licked it down. She pulled out the car lighter and lit up, all of which surprised Caroline. Then the girl passed it to him, and they shared the smoke. They didn’t offer it to Caroline at first, then the girl gestured the joint toward her as she inhaled. Caroline shook her head no and looked out the window. There was a menace to the offer, a sort of chaos to the exchange, when the license of drugs was divorced from any familiar context. The joint had been appropriated by anyone, or by the mainstream, for baser, meaner purpose. Appropriated as another way to get fucked up and do what you want. Not liberation but mere licentiousness. Why not? Was there anything inherently groovy in a drug?
They continued for a few miles in silence. Caroline considered the possibility that she should escape, but then she shrugged it off. Everyone gave off freaky vibes toward her, she just needed to stay calm. She sat and waited until the man turned the car off the road to the shrub-concealed shoulder. He got out of the front seat, and the girl edged over to the driver’s seat. All of this happened quickly and with no words uttered. The area was deserted, and before Caroline got herself together to run for the bushes and take
her chances in the middle of nowhere, the girl pulled out into the road and the man with the short, neatly combed hair sat in the back with her. Caroline saw the girl glance in the rearview mirror at them: the slightly bored, lascivious look finally sent Caroline’s adrenaline into her chest and limbs. The girl smirked a bit at Caroline’s eye contact and hit the gas as the man reached for her in the backseat. Caroline pushed him away, but he just pushed her down on the seat. He was not smirking but serious as he pulled her T-shirt up and held it. She shrieked, and he covered her mouth with his forearm. He used his other hand to pin both her arms over her head and held both her wrists tightly with his hand. He didn’t say a word, in fact he had a vacant calm about him. He took his other arm away from her mouth and moved it down to his pants. Caroline didn’t scream but took advantage of the moment to push herself hard to get out from under his body. He brought the back of his hand up fast in a smack under her chin, jarring her head and neck. Her jaw felt fragile under the blow. She stopped moving. She watched him reach his hand down below his waist, his maneuvering and hitching out. She could taste her own blood where her teeth had hit her tongue. She felt him yank the elastic top of her skirt down and then pull it up. Her underwear was maybe ripped off or pushed aside. She couldn’t tell. She didn’t struggle and lay there at a distance from the moment; it happened, and she was as absent as she could be. She did think about not wanting to be beaten or killed. And would not think of him thrusting at her or feel him inside her. She could will that. She did think for a moment of the girl watching in the rearview mirror, and it made her gasp. Then she regained herself and willed herself immobile and totally withdrawn. It worked. It ended quickly after all. And in his disgust at the end, he pulled away from her with a shove but did not hurt her further. The girl pulled over, and they left her by the side of the road. The whole incident took less than fifteen minutes.
Almost instantly her feeling came back. She felt as achy as if she had been run over. She straightened out her clothes. Bruises would soon appear. Then she felt—and this was truly the worst of it—his mess ooze out of her, into what remained of her underpants. She pushed with her muscles until she got it all out of her, then pulled her panties off, under her skirt, by the side of the road. She wiped herself as efficiently and discreetly as possible with the damp cotton. She felt a deep humiliation holding her underwear in her hand and not knowing what to do next. She shrugged her shoulder up and pushed her face against her short sleeve to wipe the tears out of her hot eyes. She discarded the soiled underpants by the side of the road. She no longer had her rucksack of clothes and few belongings. That was still in the car with them. She had thirty dollars in one of her shoes and that was it.
She sat for a while on a rock at the edge of the road. She stopped crying. Then she thought: It never happened. She would never speak of it, or let herself think of it, ever. She was quite certain that you could change your past, change the facts, by will alone. Only memory makes it real. So eliminate the memory. And if it was also true that there were occasions when she couldn’t control where her mind went—a dream, a cold sweat at an unexpected moment, an odor that would suddenly betray her—time would improve it. Time lessens everything—the good things you desperately want to remember, and the awful things you need to forget. Eventually all will be equally faint. This was one thing her second life had taught her about how humans endure.
It was at this point—and not later, when the meeting with Bobby at their agreed-upon rendezvous point didn’t happen—that she began to inhabit her new life as her only life.
Dead Infants
SHE MADE IT to a friendly, unhip, stranded desert town just over the border from Arizona. Nova, California, population three thousand. It was, despite the best efforts of fifty years of laissez-faire development, a pretty town. It sat on a mesa and looked at desert and mountains. She rented a room with a name she made up on the spot. She spent her last few dollars on hair dye—light brown to match her roots. Leaning close to the mirror, she put on several coats of mascara and some pink lipstick. She patted concealer over the bruise on her chin and finished with face powder that looked a shade too pale. She pulled her newly dyed hair up and piled it on the crown of her head. Then she pinned a wide headband in front of the piled hair.
She landed a waitress job in a diner the very first afternoon she looked. She felt a surge of confidence and safety. The counterculture didn’t exist here. She could have her own hair color and she could have a “public” job. In the vast expanse of this country, who was she to stand out?
Every morning she got up at five. She went to the diner and got ready for the breakfast rush. It was over by eight thirty, and then they would have a long cigarette break and get ready for the lunch rush at eleven thirty. They were busy, which made the time pass quickly. At two she would be exhausted and nearly done with her work. Ready for another cigarette, a change of clothes, and then a beer or a Seven & Seven. The girls all drank Seven & Seven or Canadian Club and Coke.
The next day they would show up, laughing about hangovers and throat clearing behind their fists over cigarettes and coffee. They stacked scratched yellow molded-plastic glasses for water. They refilled ketchup bottles and saltshakers. The quarters and dimes added up to a surprising amount of money. She liked the midmorning coffee break: one lit cigarette after another, and endless cups of weak coffee from thick mugs with permanent stains in the bottoms. It took three packets of sugar and two containers of half-and-half for the coffee to taste of anything. They wiped old, sticky syrup from plastic dispensers with wet cotton rags. They swept the floor and sprayed Windex on the Formica counter (Formica is a decorative laminate made of paper and melamine resin—she couldn’t help but hear Bobby’s voice. But it pleased her that she remembered), then there was yet another cigarette break, and a round of cleaning plastic menus until they signed out at three. Sometimes in the heat of the rush they would move within inches of each other—reach and duck at the exact right moment without saying a word. She felt an adrenaline lift getting it done when five things needed to be done all at once. Being able to do this in the face of chaos gave her a tangible confidence she hadn’t felt before. It was satisfying—a confidence that she wore in her hips.
She wasn’t exactly like these women, it was true, but she was close enough.
These were not “liberated” women. They wore orange-toned Pan-Cake makeup and push-up bras. They all watched their figures (and used that word, figure) and never wore anything but inexpensive, synthetic clothes. They didn’t discuss the issue of vaginal versus clitoral orgasms or debate the inherent oppression of intercourse. But they spoke often of sex and men—all of them were divorced or supporting someone who cheated on them. They wore awful orange-tan stockings and took care of their kids by themselves. They smoked and drank and didn’t mind their lives until they had one too many Seven & Sevens. Then they burst into tears at the prospect of forty more years of the same jobs and the same men, but with less pretty faces and more painful backs.
They weren’t all that different from the consciousness-raising women or from her.
She liked it, and within days she felt she could pass for one of them. She was getting good at this, she really was. It was funny—she thought of it like that, but she was one of them. After all, who were they, exactly?
Anyone can start a new life, even in a small town. Everyone moves so much these days. You get a divorce, you move and start over. Try it. See how little people ask about you. See how little people listen. Or, more precisely, think about how little you really know about the people you know. Where they were born, for instance. Have you met their parents? Or siblings? There was a time, maybe, when just being new in a town made you seem suspect. Because you were suspect—people didn’t have any way to verify you were who you said you were. And why did you have to leave where you came from? But there is a long history (seldom spoken of in the gloriously amnesiac everyday) in America, and in a democracy, of starting over. It was almost an imperative, wasn
’t it? America was founded, of course, by people who invented new lives, who wanted nothing more than to jettison the weight of all that history, all that burden and all that memory of Europe. That was one form of freedom. Freedom from memory and history and accounting. Even if an endless series of beginnings tended to reduce everything to shallow repetition and eliminate any possibility of profound experience, it certainly served her, at this moment, in this place.
New Year’s Eve, 1973. She sat at the bar and waited for her friend Betsy to return from the bathroom. They had already drunk many cocktails and were probably going to go to a party with Betsy’s boyfriend and his buddy. Or they would stay at the bar all night and listen to the bartender, Jack, in his early thirties and with the indifferent, slightly crawly sexiness of Bruce Dern, but with more muscles and less darkness. He doted on them but only ever spoke in a deadpan that the women found increasingly hysterical. He would do just as well as a party, and they would not have to worry about fresh drinks or melted ice at midnight.
It was true that she could have driven to L.A. She could have covered a few shifts at work, borrowed Betsy’s car and been in Venice in five hours. It was also true that, despite her drinks and Jack’s dry humor, she did think about whether Bobby had turned up at the designated place and was waiting for her right now. But she was pretty sure he wouldn’t have shown. She could not bear going there, all that way, to be let down by him. She would rather sit here and still have the possibility that he might have shown rather than the certainty of disappointment. It was 1974, and she celebrated with her new friends and began the unthinking of it. She tried not to think about the dream she’d had the night before. She didn’t believe in premonitions, of course, but she had started to feel uneasy. All the paranoia came back. Her ID here was not at all secure—she had been way too careless about that, again. And there, at the edges of the forced festivities of this night, among her new friends, she knew she would be leaving this place also—definitely and soon.
